dimanche 24 août 2014

Animals that don't Exist

The Cloud Eater

The cloud eater, Passer
vesconimbus, is related to the
common house sparrow, Passer domesticus.
Although the species has only been discovered recently, sightings of
the cloud eater have been reported for over a thousand years, if only
sporadically. In Europe, they
were believed to protect the people from floods, and were thought to
be messengers of God, since they lived so close to him. In the more
arid parts of Africa, they were welcomed as the bringers of rain, and
the first sightings of cloud eaters would be the signal to start the
rain festivals that announced the beginning of the new harvest.

In
the beginning of the XVIIth century, as the renaissance started, and
people began to rely more on science, the myths surrounding the cloud
eater, and the existence of the species, begun to be dismissed as
superstition. It would take another three hundred years to
conclusively prove its existence.

Just
as his name indicates, the cloud eater eats, well, clouds. Or, to be
more precise, the cloud eater eats the tiny organisms that live
inside the clouds. These organisms, which often have been imported
into the cloud through evaporation, and stay within the water vapor
thanks to Brownian motion, have an effect on cloud formations and
eventual precipitation. And by eating them and regulating their
population, so does the cloud eater.

Due
mostly to the increased pollution levels found in the atmosphere, as
well as the direct interference by planes that has increased
drastically these past years, cloud eater populations are on decline
around the globe. And it seems that there absence is having a
dramatic effect on
precipitations around the world.

The
diminution of cloud eater populations means an increase of microbial
life in the clouds. This increase, in turn, means that the effect of
said microbial populations on cloud formation and precipitation
events is increased. Given that these microbes act mainly as
catalysts to precipitation, their increase has led to shorter
half-life times for clouds, meaning that precipitations occur much
sooner in the cloud's life-cycle. Concretely, what this means is that
places with little precipitation will have even less from now on,
since clouds will tend to “pour out” their water sooner. This
will lead to a marked skew in precipitation throughout the world,
causing floods in places close to cloud-forming events, and droughts
in those far away.

Even
though not only biologists, but the whole of the scientific community
has stressed the importance of the cloud eater in regulating water
flow, conservation efforts are still remarkably feeble in comparison
to the increased pollution that we see.

In
some parts of the world, it is now believed that the clouds are
mourning the passing of their friends, and that is why they cannot
stop crying.

1 commentaire:

Shit. This is a sad one man! But really nice ;) However, I recently heard that a flock of Cloud Eater had been found inside a data center near Chengdu. Apparently, the heat produced by the servers created a high-level of humidity, and the air being much cleaner inside than outside... Evolution is on it's way!